This spring, we will spread protest against the U.S. use of drones for targeted killing and surveillance.

We are rapidly coming together for protest at drone manufacturing sites, military bases that deploy drones, and campuses where drone research and training are quickening.

World Can’t Wait will focus on reaching students especially, and in bringing out the voices of people who are targeted in the U.S. dirty wars.

The campaign will provide information on:

1. The suffering of tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Gaza who are under drone attack, documenting the killing, the wounding and the devastating impact of constant drone surveillance on community life.

2. How attack and surveillance drones have become a key element in a massive wave of surveillance, clandestine military attacks andMilitarization generated by the United States to “protect a global system” of manufacture and oil and mineral exploitation that is creating unemployment and poverty, accelerating the waste of nonrenewable resources and contributing to environmental destruction.

In addition to cases in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia, we will examine President Obama’s “pivot” into the Asia–Pacific, where the United States has already sold and deployed drones in the vanguard of a shift of 60% of its military forces to try to control China and to enforce the planned Trans–Pacific Partnership. We will show, among other things, how this surge of “pivot” forces, greatly enabled by drones, and supported by the US military-industrial complex, will hit every American community with even deeper cuts in the already fragile social programs on which people rely for survival. In short, we will connect drones and militarization with “austerity” in America.

3. How drone attacks have effectively destroyed international and domestic legal protection of the rights to life, privacy, freedom of assembly and free speech and have opened the way for new levels of surveillance and repression around the world, and how, in the United States, increasingdrone surveillance, added to surveillance by the National Security Agencyand police, provides a new weapon to repress black, Hispanic, immigrant and low-income communities and to intimidate Americans who are increasingly unsettled by lack of jobs, economic inequality, corporate control of politics and the prospect of endless war.

We will discuss how the United States government and corporations conspire secretly to monitor US citizens and particularly how the Administration is accelerating drone surveillance operations and surveillance inside the United States with the same disregard for transparency and law that it applies to other countries, all with the cooperation of the Congress.

The campaign will encourage activists around the world to win passage of local laws that prohibit Weaponized Drones and drone surveillance from being used in their communities as well as seeking national laws to bar the use of weaponized drones and drone surveillance.

The campaign will draw attention to the call for a ban on weaponized drones by RootsAction.org that has generated a petition with over 80,000 signersand to efforts by the Granny Peace Brigade (New York City), KNOWDRONES and others to achieve an international ban on both weaponized drones and drone surveillance.

San Diego is the US capital of spying and killer drone production. No Drones Days of Actionstarts on Thursday afternoon with street action and evening Overpass Light Brigade messaging; More demonstrations on Friday; winding up on Saturday with a general assembly at the Church of the Brethren/Friends Center campus. THIS IS YOUR OPPORTUNITY to help move this nation away from empire and toward a better future.

May 15 – Thursday

4-7 pm – San Diego Veterans for Peace demonstration at Federal Building Front St. and Broadway, downtown San Diego. Street theater staged serial ‘drone attack’ by Artful Activist San Diego.

May 17 – Saturday

We are protesting nonviolently. We ask you to be open and respectful to all and to not use physical or verbal violence against those who disagree with us. We ask that there be no property destruction or damage during the protests that are part of these four days of action.

We ask that you respect the wishes of the organizers of the individual events. If you are not in agreement with the particular event tactics or organizers, we invite you to hold a protest of your choosing at a different time.

Sponsoring/Endorsing organizations: San Diego Coalition for Peace & Justice; Peace Resource Center of San Diego; Veterans for Peace San Diego Chapter; San Diego Overpass Light Brigade; Women Occupy San Diego (WOSD); Occupy San Diego; Artful Activist San Diego; Canvass for a Cause (CFAC); Back Country Voices; San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality (SAME); San Diego BDS; United Against Police Terror San Diego; Green Party of San Diego; Code Pink; San Diego International Socialist Organization; AFSC-San Diego..

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Housing Available for Out-of-Town Activists!

Make your plans to come to Drone Diego and local activists will welcome you into our homes.
Don’t delay! For housing info, contact Lynn: dissential@gmail.com

Concerned residents of San Diego County have joined together to form a citizens action group, ‘Back Country Voices | Citizen’s Action Group.’ Back Country Voices has provide the necessary public outreach and education to better address the ramifications of a ‘National Drone Testing Site’ in our back country. It was recently noted (September 24) in the UT San Diego, KPBS, and several news channels, that the 5 San Diego County Supervisors voted unanimously to approve San Diego back country as one of the 6 proposed ‘National Drone Test Sites’ to be determined by the FAA in December, 2013.

The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is a subunified command of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCO). It is charged to study special operations requirements and techniques, ensure interoperability and equipment standardization, plan and conduct special operations exercises and training, and develop joint special operations tactics.

Despite its innocuous sounding charter, JSOC has made strides in the special operations field and is comprised of rigorously screened and accessed Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Civilians. These men and women possess unique and specialized skills, and are routinely among the best in their field. Among them are seasoned combat veterans who cut their teeth by participating in joint special operations liked the Sơn Tây prison camp Raid in Vietnam War which took place in 1970, long before JSOC was activated.

More recent members of the Command include active duty special operations veterans of all services who have successfully completed the toughest training regiments and demonstrated their mettle under the most challenging and difficult circumstances, including combat. As a result, past and present members of JSOC have participated in all of our nation’s wars and contingency operations since it was activated in 1980.

Included among the places that military and civilian members of the Command have previously served are Desert One in Iran (1980), Grenada (1983), the Mediterranean Sea during the Achille Lauro hijacking (1985), Panama (1989), the Mideast during the Gulf War (1991), Somalia (1993), Haiti (1994), the Balkans (1996-2002), Afghanistan (2001-present), and Iraq (2003-present).

Obama’s secret assassins

The president has a clandestine network targeting a ‘kill list‘ justified by secret laws. How is that different than a death squad?

The film Dirty Wars, which premiered at Sundance, can be viewed as an important narrative of excesses in the global “war on terror.” It is also a record of something scary for those of us at home – and uncovers the biggest story, I would say, in our nation’s contemporary history. Though they wisely refrain from drawing inferences, Scahill and Rowley have uncovered the facts of a new unaccountable power in America and the world that has the potential to shape domestic and international events in an unprecedented way. The film tracks the Joint Special Operations Command (JSoc), a network of highly-trained, completely unaccountable US assassins, armed with ever-expanding “kill lists”. It was JSoc that ran the operation behind the allegedNavy Seal team six that killed bin Laden. Scahill and Rowley track this new model of US warfare that strikes at civilians and insurgents alike – in 70 countries. They interview former JSoc Secret Assassins, who are shell-shocked at how the “kill lists” they are given keep expanding, even as they eliminate more and more people. Our conventional forces are subject to international laws of war: they are accountable for crimes in courts martial; and they run according to a clear chain of command. As much as the US military may fall short of these standards at times, it is a model of lawfulness compared with JSoc, which has far greater scope to undertake the commission of extra-legal operations – and unimaginable crimes. JSoc morphs the secretive, unaccountable mercenary model of private military contracting, which Scahill identified in Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, into a hybrid with the firepower and intelligence backup of our full state resources. The Hill reports that JSoc is now seeking more “flexibility” to expand its operations globally. JSoc operates outside the traditional chain of command; it reports directly to the president of the United States.In the words of Wired magazine:

“JSoc operates with practically no accountability.”

Scahill calls JSoc the president’s “paramilitary.” Its budget, which may be in the billions, is secret.

What does it means for the president to have an unaccountable paramilitary force, which can assassinate anyone anywhere in the world? JSOC has already been sent to kill at least one US citizen – one who had been indicted for no crime, but was condemned for propagandizing for al-Qaida. Anwar al-Awlaki, on JSoc’s “kill list” since 2010, was killed by CIA-controlled drone attack in September 2011; his teenage son, Abdulrahman Al Awlaki– also a US citizen – was killed by a US drone two weeks later.

This arrangement – where death squads roam under the sole control of the executive – is one definition of dictatorship.It now has the potential to threaten critics of the US anywhere in the world.

The film reveals some of these dangers: Scahill, writing in the Nation, reported that President Obama called Yemen‘s President Saleh in 2011 to express “concern” about jailed reporter Abdulelah Haider Shaye. US spokespeople have confirmed the US interest in keeping him in prison.

Shaye, a Yemeni journalist based in Sana’a, had a reputation for independent journalism through his neutral interviewing of al-Qaida operatives, and of critics of US policy such as Anwar al-Awlaki. Journalist colleagues in Yemen dismiss the notion of any terrorist affiliation: Shaye had worked for the Washington Post, ABC news, al-Jazeera, and other major media outlets.

Shaye went to al-Majala in Yemen, where a missile strike had killed a group that the US had called “al-Qaida” i.e. CIA. “What he discovered,” reports Scahill, “were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs … some of them bearing the label ‘Made in the USA’, and distributed the photos to international media outlets.”

Fourteen women and 21 children were killed. “Whether anyone actually active in al-Qaida was killed remains hotly contested.” Shortly afterwards, Shaye was kidnapped and beaten by Yemeni security forces. In a trial that was criticized internationally by reporters’ groups and human rights organizations, he was accused of terrorism.

Scahill and Rowley got to the bars of Shaye’s cell to interview him, before the camera goes dark (in almost every scene, they put their lives at risk). This might also bring to mind the fates of Sami al-Haj of al-Jazeera, also kidnapped, and sent to Guantánamo, and of Julian Assange, trapped in asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy.

President Obama thus helped put a respected reporter in prison for reporting critically on JSoc’s activities. The most disturbing issue of all, however, is the documentation of the “secret laws” now facilitating these abuses of American power: Scahill succeeds in getting Senator Ron Wyden, who sits on the Senate intelligence committee, to confirm the fact that there are secret legal opinions governing the use of drones in targeted assassinations that, he says, Americans would be “very surprised” to know about. This is not the first time Wyden has issued this warning.

“It is impossible for Congress to hold an informed public debate on the Patriot Act when there is a significant gap between what most Americans believe the law says and what the government is using the law to do. In fact, I believe many members of Congress who have voted on this issue would be stunned to know how the Patriot Act is being interpreted and applied.

“Even secret operations need to be conducted within the bounds of established, publicly understood law. Any time there is a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the government secretly thinks the law says, I believe you have a serious problem.”

I have often wondered, since I first wrote about America’s slide toward fascism, what was driving it. I saw the symptoms but not the cause. Scahill’s and Rowley’s brave, transformational film reveals the prime movers at work. The US executive now has a network of secret laws, secret budgets, secret kill lists, and a well-funded, globally deployed army of secret teams of assassins.That is precisely the driving force working behind what we can see. Is fascism really too strong a word to describe it?

Reprieve, the excellent British human-rights organisation, has submitted a communication to the ICC asking it to investigate NATO personnel involved in CIA drone strikes in Pakistan. Here is Reprieve’s press release:

It has been revealed in recent months that the UK, Germany, Australia, and other NATO partners support US drone strikes through intelligence-sharing. Because all these countries are signatories to the Rome Statute, they fall under The ICC’s jurisdiction and can therefore be investigated for war crimes. Kareem Khan – whose civilian brother and son were killed in a 2009 drone strike – is at The Hague with his lawyers from the human rights charity Reprieve and the Foundation for Fundamental Rights who have filed the complaint on his behalf.

The CIA has launched more than 300 missiles at North Waziristan since its covert drone programme began and it is estimated that between 2004 and 2013, thousands of people have been killed, many of them civilians including children.

The US has immunised itself from legal accountability over drone strikes and the UK has closed its domestic courts to foreign drone victims. In a recent decision, the Court of Appeal in London ruled that it would not opine on the legality of British agents’ involvement in the US drone war in Pakistan, for fear of causing embarrassment to its closest ally.

The communication is a fascinating document to read, and it is quite damning concerning the effects of the CIA’s drone strikes. My interest in the communication, however, focuses on twocritical legal issues: (1) whether the International Criminal Court (ICC) would have jurisdiction over NATO personnel involved in the CIA’s strikes; and (2) whether it can be persuasively argued that those personnel have been complicit in the strikes.

As the communication acknowledges, neither Pakistan (where the drone strikes took place) nor the US (which launched the drone strikes) has ratified the Rome Statute. Reprieve nevertheless asserts that the ICC would have jurisdiction over NATO personnel involved in the drone strikes — particularly individuals from the UK, Germany, and Australia — on two different grounds (para. 7):

The Court’s jurisdiction over the crimes committed as a result of drone strikes in Pakistan arises in two ways. The first is (subjective) territorial jurisdiction on grounds that the attacks were launched from a State Party (e.g. Afghanistan), while the second is nationality (on grounds that there is a reasonable basis for concluding that the nationals of States Parties to the Rome Statute may have participated in crimes under the Statute.

It may seem odd that the communication spends time trying to establish that Art. 12(2)(a) of the Rome Statute, the territorial jurisdiction provision, includes subjective territoriality. Why not just invoke nationality jurisdiction, given that Reprieve is only asking the ICC to investigate “nationals of States Parties”? In fact, the communication’s move is actually quite clever — and necessary.

Consider what Article 25(3) says, in relevant part (emphasis mine): “In accordance with this Statute, a person shall be criminally responsible and liable for punishment for a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court if that person…” The italicized language is critical, because the communication does not claim that the NATO personnel are co-perpetrators of the war crimes allegedly committed by CIA drone operators. On the contrary, Reprieve views those individuals as accessories to the crimes (para. 13; emphasis mine):

Article 25 sets out the circumstances in which individuals can incur criminal responsibility under the Statute, expressly recognizing different forms of secondary liability for crimes under international law including aiding and abetting a crime, ordering, soliciting or inducing a crime and joint criminal enterprise. There is, of course, no basis under the Statute to interpret Article 12(2)(a) as requiring that each and every element of the conduct comprising the crime must be committed within the territory of a State Party. Many crimes will involve conduct occurring partly in the territory of a State Party and partly outside it. Were liability to be precluded by reason of this perpetrators of many crimes would readily avoid the jurisdiction of the Court. Such an interpretation would fatally undermine the entire concept of individual criminal responsibility set out in Article 25 of the Statute and is therefore unsustainable.

JCE (joint criminal enterprise) is actually a form of principal liability, but there is no joint criminal enterprise in the Rome Statute anyway — just contributing to a group crime, which is a form of accessorial (secondary) liability. The point, though, is this: the modes of participation specified in Art. 25 are not crimes in themselves; they are mechanisms for holding accessories responsible for the crimes of others. Even if nationals of States Parties have been complicit in war crimes committed by CIA drone operators, therefore, that does not mean “a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court” has been committed. Indeed, if the principal perpetrators of the war crimes in question are exclusively American, no crime within the Court’s jurisdiction has been committed — the Court does not have jurisdiction over acts that are committed by nationals of a non-State Party on the territory of a non-State Party, even acts that otherwise qualify as war crimes.

The communication’s emphasis on subjective territoriality, then, is anything but superfluous. On the contrary, the Court must have subjective territorial jurisdiction over the CIA’s alleged war crimes, because that is the only way it becomes possible to hold NATO personnel — even nationals of States Parties — responsible for those war crimes as accessories. No crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court, no secondary liability. It’s that simple.

So does the subjective territoriality argument work? I’m not so sure, because the argument depends on two interrelated assumptions that are anything but self-evident. The first, of course, is that Art. 12(2)(a) of the Rome Statute adopts both subjective and objective territorial jurisdiction. Here is what the communication says (paras. 12-13):

Further, the terms of the Statute itself support this interpretation of the territorial jurisdiction conferred upon the Court. Under Article 12 (2) (a) of the Rome Statute provides that the Court may exercise jurisdiction where “[t]he State on the territory of which the conduct in question occurred” is a State Party to the Statute. According to Article 31 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties “[a] treaty shall be interpreted in good faith in accordance with the ordinary meaning to be given to the terms of the treaty in their context and in the light of its object and purpose”. As regards the text of Article 12 (2) (a), there is no stipulation that all of the conduct must occur within the State Party to the Statute.

The context is also instructive. As part of the “context” of Article 12 (2) (a), the
other provisions of the Statute must be taken into account. Article 25 sets out
the circumstances in which individuals can incur criminal responsibility under the
Statute, expressly recognizing different forms of secondary liability for crimes under international law including aiding and abetting a crime, ordering, soliciting or inducing a crime and joint criminal enterprise. There is, of course, no basis under the Statute to interpret Article 12(2)(a) as requiring that each and every element of the conduct comprising the crime must be committed within the territory of a State Party. Many crimes will involve conduct occurring partly in the territory of a State Party and partly outside it. Were liability to be precluded by reason of this perpetrators of many crimes would readily avoid the jurisdiction of the Court. Such an interpretation would fatally undermine the entire concept of individual criminal responsibility set out in Article 25 of the Statute and is therefore unsustainable.

I’m not impressed by the argument that Art. 12(2)(a) has to include subjective territoriality because many bad guys will get away if it doesn’t. Such victim-centered teleological reasoning — to invoke Darryl Robinson’s expression — has no business in a serious legal argument. I’m also not sure it’s enough to say that the Rome Statute adopts subjective territoriality because it does not specifically rule it out. I doubt the drafters of Art. 12 ever discussed the issue. (Though I welcome corrections on that point.) That said, given how widely accepted subjective territoriality is among states — there might be some that reject it, but I couldn’t find any after a relatively extensive google search — it does make a certain amount of sense to assume that the ordinary meaning of “territorial jurisdiction” includes both objective and subjective territoriality.

So let’s give the communication its first assumption. The second necessary assumption, then, is that at least one element of the CIA’s alleged war crimes — basically, all the various war crimes in the Rome Statute involving attacks on civilians — took place on the territory of a State Party, thereby triggering the Court’s subjective territorial jurisdiction. Here is the communication on that point (paras. 8-9):

Although Pakistan is not a State Party to the Rome Statute, the Court has jurisdiction in respect of the drone strikes in Pakistan under Article 12 (2) (a) of the Statute, where attacks are launched from the territory of a State Party.

Publicly available and uncontested information demonstrates that drone strikes in Pakistan are now launched exclusively from either Jalalabad Air Base and/or Kandahar Airbase in Afghanistan, which has been a State Party to the Rome Statute since 10 February 2003 . Until 2011, the drones carrying out the strikes in Pakistan were launched from both Jalalabad Air Base in Afghanistan and Shamsi Air Base in Pakistan. US Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) personnel on the ground in both of these locations would handle the launch and recovery phase of the drone’s flight path, while pilots based at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada would take over control of the weapon once it was airborne.

This is far too facile. There is no question that conduct relevant to the attacks in question took place in Afghanistan. But did an element of a crime take place there?That is much less clear. Here, for example, are the key elements of the actus reus of the war crime of attacking civilians, Art. 8(2)(e)(i) of the Rome Statute:

1. The perpetrator directed an attack.

2. The object of the attack was a civilian population as such or individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities.

The actus reus of this war crime consists of a conduct element (directing an attack) and a circumstance element (the object of attack qualifying as civilian). With a drone strike, the circumstance element obviously takes place in Pakistan, a non-State Party. So the question is whether the physical act of launching a drone, which took place in Afghanistan, a State Party, is part of the “directing an attack” conduct element.

There is no clear answer to that question. It is tempting to compare the drone situation to the classic subjective territoriality example, in which D fires a shot from Italy, hits V in France, and V dies in Switzerland. If that’s the correct comparison, the communication’s argument is in trouble, because in the drone situation the fatal shots are being fired from Pakistan, not from Afghanistan. It would be difficult to argue that Italy would have subjective territorial jurisdiction if D picked up the gun in Italy but did not shoot V until after he had walked into France — seemingly the more precise analogy.

The difficulty, of course, is that a drone is different from a gun in a critical respect — unlike a gun, a drone can (and must) be fired remotely. Or, put another way, a drone is a gun whose trigger is located in a different state. That’s important, because I think it means that firing a drone does, in fact, qualify as part of the conduct element of an attack on civilians. Which means, in turn, that the ICC would have jurisdiction over a drone strike in Pakistan that was directed by an operator physically located in Afghanistan.

But that argument alone does not save the communication. By its own admission, the drone strikes are being directed by operators in the US, not in Afghanistan. The drones are simply being launched from Afghanistan. Is launching also part of the conduct element of directing an attack? I’m dubious, because of the second gun analogy above. I think flying the drone into Pakistan is not materially different than carrying the gun into France. It is conduct relevant to the drone attack, but it is not part of the attack itself.

That said, I would not be surprised if the Court disagreed with me. After all, most common-law courts — and I’d be interested to know what civil-law courts do in these situations — take a flexible attitude toward the actus reus of a crime, refusing to chop a defendant’s conduct into discrete and unrelated temporal slices. In other words, I could easily see the ICC viewing the conduct involved in “directing an attack” as including everything from the launch of the drone to the firing of the rockets at civilian targets. If so, the communication’s argument would work: at least one element of the CIA’s alleged war crimes would have taken place in Afghanistan, a State Party, thereby permitting the Court to exercise subjective territorial jurisdiction over those war crimes.

The bottom line is this: the jurisdiction argument is far more complicated than Reprieve’s communication acknowledges. To have jurisdiction over the CIA’s alleged war crimes, the Court must be willing to hold (1) that Art. 12(2)(a) embraces both objective and subjective territoriality, and (2) that the act of launching a drone qualifies as part of the conduct element of “directing an attack.” There are plausible arguments for both (1) and (2) — but they are anything but a slam dunk.

In Sana’a, Yemenis angered over the American drone campaign against militants in Yemen swelled Friday with word that most of those killed in a strike a day earlier were civilians in a wedding party.

The death toll reached 17 overnight, hospital officials in central Bayda province said Friday. Five of those killed were “suspected” of involvement with al-Qaida, but the remainder were “unconnected with the militancy,” Yemeni security officials said.

U.S. drone strikes have become commonplace in Yemen, where “government measures have proved ineffectual” against what is considered one of the most virulent al-Qaida offshoots in the region.

However, civilian deaths like those in Thursday’s strike have inflamed popular sentiment against both the U.S. and the fragile central government.

The Obama administration generally does not publicly disclose individual strikes, though it has acknowledged the existence of the drone campaign. Human rights groups in recent months have called for greater transparency about drone strikes. [Which has been largely unacknowledged]

The incident is likely to fuel existing concerns in Congress and elsewhere about the White House’s stated intention to move most of the “drone program under military control.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., for example, said in May that she believed “the military had not been as patient or precise in drone strikes as the CIA has been.”

In Yemen, the stakes are getting higher as violence increases. AL QAEDA/CIA-linked militants were suspected in an audacious Dec. 5 attack on the country’s well-fortified defense ministry, in which at least 56 people were killed, including some foreigners. Many of the dead were working at a hospital inside the complex.

Video footage of that attack, aired this week on state television, showed assailants methodically stalking medical personnel, including a wounded nurse. In one chilling scene, an attacker calmly approaches a group of civilians, then hurls a grenade at them, obscuring the camera lens with dust and debris from the explosion.

The capital, Sanaa, has been jittery in the aftermath of the attack on the defense ministry, with checkpoints springing up and international organizations on high alert.

Thursday’s drone attack, southeast of Sanaa, was the second in a week in Yemen. The remoteness of the area precluded precise immediate reports, but by Friday, security sources said most of the dead were traveling in a convoy of wedding guests.

In the gruesome aftermath, scorched vehicles and body parts were left scattered on the road.

The incident illustrated the fact that many of the militants have tribal connections that make them “likely” to take part in village events, such as wedding celebrations.

Yemen’s struggling government has been battling separate insurgencies in the north and south, as well as unrest over domestic issues including a floundering economy.

Angry relatives of Yemeni civilians killed this drone strike have demanded an apology and compensation, warning of tribal protests, an official said Saturday.

“The first demand is an end to strikes. They also want financial and moral compensation,”the official said.

The local official said protesters agreed to bury the dead only after a tribal committee promised mediation with the central authorities in Sana’a.

The US military operates all unmanned aircraft flying over Yemen which have killed [at least] dozens in a sharply intensified campaign this year.

But critics say the drone strikes that are meant to target militants also kill a large number of civilians and have demanded an end to the secrecy surrounding their use.

“Even if it turns out that this was a case of killing based on mistaken identity or dodgy intelligence, whoever was responsible needs to own up to the error and come clean about what happened in this incident,”said Philip Luther, Amnesty International’sMiddle East and North Africa director.